Monday, June 05, 2006

Who has the perfect face?

Researchers at the Perception Lab (echo echo) have used the judgements of a group of 34 young women to generate a composite image of the perfect male face. Tony Little, the principal research psychologist at said lab:
Women find femininity appealing in a male face because they said they associate it with co-operation, honesty and parental ability. Strongly masculine features are considered threatening and less attractive, but they still want some combination involving masculine features because they want dominance, too.

Now there's a trap for young players.

Picture a man, a slightly weepy character, who is young for his age and has a twitchy eyelid. This man has made a routine out of nibbling on bits of cake and fingering his ears while mumbling to himself in the company canteen at lunchtime.

Deep down he knows the truth: whatever revision of his personal history can be achieved by cake-fueled ear excavation will always, in the end, be overridden by the fact that on every day at school his sandwiches were taken from him by Bull Thompson, soaked in urine, and, moments before the bell, smeared in his face.

At university, this boy almost failed his first year of animal behaviour science because he was addicted to muscle milk and four different varieties of thermogenic fat burner. He hauled weights around his mother's walk-in wardrobe till four in the morning, six nights a week. He wolfed strange powders and pills with his banana porridge. He even pasted theatre hair above his lip to conceal an expanding fuzz of bum fluff. He paid particular attention to sculpting his face in the manner of a Schwarzenegger, a Pearce, a Brereton or, on some confusing days, all three at the same time. No amount of drug-enraged screaming from his sister (who only wore her Howard Cunningham mask inside the house) distracted him from his late-afternoon vanity mirror ritual of prodding and reshaping, twisting, tugging, kneading and hoping that it'd all be worthwhile in the end, that it'd all make him absolutely irresistible to the opposite sex . . . in the end.

But before it got too hard, he discovered god, bought a skateboard that he never used and moved in with his psychiatrist's dog obedience trainer.






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